Conclusion

As you can see from those results, the Intel Core2Quad is still up to date if you compare it to the FX-4170/FX-8150 from AMD. Okay in some games like Call of Duty, Skyrim and StarCraft II, the AMD FXs are 10 % faster than the Core2Quad but that's all. Everywhere else those processors are scoring almost the same at +/- 1% in both games and synthetic benchmarks. Talking about games only and throwing away synthetic benchmarks away from the calculation, the AMD FXs processors are only 3 % faster in average. Which is not bad at all since the Q6600 is five and a half years old, has only four cores clocked at 3.0 GHz (for this test, stock frequency is 2.4 GHz) and powered by DDR2 Memory. Why the Core2Quad is not far away behind latest AMD's processor for example? There are several reasons but the main ones are the following:
- Today's games are still not optimized for multicore processors.
- AMD's FX architecture result in serious lacks of performance. Mostly due to non optimized softwares.

Now if you compare the Q6600 to the i7 3770K you see a serious gap performancewise going from almost nothing up to twice the performance. But hey, this is another league. Anyway the results are in and here is what we see:
- You don't see any performance improvement going for the Core2Quad to the Core i7 in Alien vs Predator.
- The Core i7 is about 5-6 % faster than the Q6600 under BattleField 3, Crysis 2 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
- The gap is only 8 % under Dragon Age II.
- Some big numbers: The Core i7 is 20 % faster under Batman, 28 % faster under DIRT2 et 45 % under Call of Duty.
- Now comes the real big numbers: The Core i7 kicked Q6600's butt by 73.1 % under Skyrim and 91 % under StarCraft II, almost twice the performance.

What if you are still using a Core 2 Duo processor, would the Core 2 Quad be worth the upgrade gaming performancewise? Well in my opinion yes, go for it, here is why:
- Increase performance by 20 up to 35 % in half of the games we tested here, and Crysis 2 even with his 40.3 fps wasn't smooth with our C2D E8400 and here it was with the Q6600.
- Increase of 2D performance as well of course, meaning daily usage of your computer will be faster and smoother.
- Easy overclocking to 3.0 GHz using 333 MHz FSB and no need to increase voltage.
- Easy upgrade, no need to change motherboard in most case nor memory and cooling.
- Price: you can find it on ebay for around 70 $ USD.
- And also because now I have one and need to sell it!

Conclusion: the Core2Quad still has some hidden power and doesn't give up too easy. If you take a look at the performance/price ratio you can see that the ratio is very close to the FX-8150 and way better than the Core i7 3770K but unfortunately way lower than the FX-4170 and E8400. The reason is that this processor is highly unavailable, using geizhals.at as price comparison tool you can find the boxed version for 170 Euros which is very expensive. While if you take a look at ebay you can easily find it for around 70 Euros max, which in this case gives him the impressive performance/price ratio of 14, destroying anything else. For the record the performance/price ratio is calculated like this: PerformanceIndex / Price x 10. As for the price of other processors we tested here - using geizhals.at - in EU the C2D E8400 is priced at 140€, the FX-4170 and FX-8150 offers start at 116 and 175€ and finally the big boy is worth 300€.

Anyway stay tuned as I said in our previous article the following CPUs are to follow: Intel Core i7 920
Intel Core i7 920 @ 4 GHz
Intel Core i5 2500K
Intel Core i3 Ivy Bridge
AMD Phenom II x6 1090T BE
AMD Phenom II x4 970

Hey guys, which fight do you want to see next time? Feel free to leave a comment!